THE WHO THE WHAT THE YEAH –
blackbox
(CD, konkord)
“It seems that I don’t like anybody and everything seems stupid to
me. How could I find a new friend?” (Randall Stokes in “Clerks 2”)
One thing should be cleared up
first: I never much liked the Hamburger School of bands such as Blumfeld,
Tocotronic, Tomte and whatever they are. I cannot really say why, but in
general it seemed too theoretical to me, too heady, too intellectual, too
much made to measure for the elite of pop-theoriticians. Well, maybe I
looked elsewhere for my kicks because these bands were hyped so much by
people I like to use as a negative compass for my interests, ie. if they
like it, I look for something else. Yeah, I was somewhat younger five to ten
years ago, even if some people claim I never was that young. But I know for
sure that I missed the cool spirit and energy of punkrock, the uncontrolled
excess. So what next?
Having said all that I am
happy that I had the opportunity to listen to The Who The What The Yeah,
because there finally is a band that combines intelligent lyrics (in German,
though, so all you readers from outside German speaking areas, be warned,
any lyric mentioned in here is translated!) and powerful alternative rock
with a big shot of punkrock-energy. Actually, it is early Sixties punkrock
energy mostly, on “unser herr bürgermeister” even with an organ. Then
they swerve into alternative rock, Arctic Monkey’s exactness, cool german
punkrock (like Oma Hans or Superpunk and sometimes a little like the
Goldenen Zitronen) or straightforward heavy pop / alternative rock. After
all they remind me mostly of my most favorite band of all times that could
be loosely connected to the abovementioned Hamburger school of bands:
Nieselregen from Switzerland. Make of that what you want.
Over all The Who The What The
Yeah bang on their instruments with energy and power. There are no
half-tries, no compromises. Even when there are background “ooohs” and
“aaahs” the guitar is always in the foreground, clean cut and direct to
the point. “Blackbox” as a whole is not polished, it is sharpened to the
edges. Every song on “Blackbox” starts with a hit on something, there
are no intros. Like a bang from out of nowhere the song is there in full
force. Also every line of lyrics is spit out with fervor and energy, so
sometimes you don’t know if the singer is angrily trying to make you aware
of a problem or aggressively push you forward to take action. Maybe they are
caught in this bipolar force field between understanding the problem and the
need to evolve the analysis into action themselves, even as a band. “we
have to understand, what holds us back” he sings on “was uns aufhält”
and finally turns that into “we have to destroy what holds us back”.
One song that made it directly
to my mix-cd-rack is “raus von hier” which starts with the nice lines
“rock’n’roll will never die, I see myself on stage as an old man”.
What a wonderful thing to say in a rocksong, especially if it is combined
with the notion that even if rock’n’roll will never die, you and me
eventually will, probably earlier than we think or have hoped for. It is
issues like these but also a wide variety of other things that come up here
and there on the album that make it double pleasure to listen to it. It is
chock full with cool sentences and aphorisms. That, and the energy infusion.
